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Is SimCity Behind the Times?

December 25, 2010, 5am PST

Transportation consultant Garrett Walker asks, "Is SimCity still making us stupid?" Walker jumps into the Rush Hour 4 Expansion Pack to see if the user is rewarded for contemporary planning techniques or outdated, autocentric ideas.

Garrett writes that one major problem is that buildings can only have one entrance, so if the street they're facing dies off the building goes into disuse even if there are several sides facing roads.

"From a transit standpoint, the greater irritant is that while many new modes of transit are now provided for, you still don't control transit service, and the prevailing assumption is that creating transit infrastructure -- wherever you find it convenient -- will cause useful service to exist. A SimCity model of the Bay Area, for example, would leave the user clueless about the difference between BART (every 20 minutes or better) and Caltrain (every two hours at off times). Both have rails, so what's the difference?"